NVS Blog

Master The Four S’s of Social Media Marketing

Online users do four basic activities. If you concentrate on perfecting and creating a great user-experience around these activities, you will create more customers.

A user’s online activities boil down to four simple things.

1. Scribe
2. Search
3. Subscribe
4. Share

What I call the Four S’s of Social Media Marketing. Search and subscribe get the lion’s share of a user’s attention as far as time so if you have limited resources, put your focus there. Master the Four S’s of online marketing and watch your bottom line grow.

Definitions:

Scribe: writing, tweeting, blogging, emailing, social networking

Search: looking for something they don’t already have. From Amazon to Bing to the New York Times, consumers are always looking for something they don’t have or know.

Subscribe: taking an action with something they already found – purchases, newsletters, RSS feeds, following friends on one of the many social networks

Execution:1. Scribe:
You heard this from every social media ‘expert’: Monitor your brand online, respond to your customers on Twitter, yada, yada, yada. There are more of your customers than you. Get them involved with creating content. Example

2. Search:
Don’t think just Google. I argue, ever social network, publisher, retailer is a vertical search engine. Can you be found when your customer’s are looking for you? Are you on Twitter? What about Facebook and Flickr? Is your content optimized for all these new social search engines (Frienfeed, Facebook, Flickr, etc)? I don’t care if you get zero followers or friends. I heard this before, “what I am going to tweet” and “we sell x, and our customers are not on Facebook.” Why are you spending so much time optimizing for just Google and ignoring all the other vertical and social search engines? You will get more mileage from this than a banner ad. More on this later. Example

3. Subscribe:
Are you making it easy for your customers to follow you or subscribe to your newsletter? Do you have an RSS feed – you will if you create a blog or create a Twitter account. No technical help needed. Walk through your shopping cart. Do you like the experience? Everything is marketing. So make sure the user experience is good and easy to buy. Example

I might not be telling you anything new. My point is to keep things simple. Focus on the Four S’s of Marketing and you will gain new customers. You can always throw money at buying ads. Build a foundation first and see how far that takes you.

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